The rapid advancement of technology in this digital age has revolutionized the way people interact with each other. Massive opportunities for businesses to increase the capability to connect with their customers has reflected on multiple digital communication channels. Businesses can utilize these touchpoints to interact closely with their customers and investigate their preferences and habits. To bring the best customer experience in digital channels, developing great UI/UX design plays a crucial component. UI stands for User Interface and UX stands for User Experience. Together, UI/UX refers to the design of digital products or services such as websites, mobile apps, and software. The goal of UI/UX design is to create products that are easy to use and visually appealing, and provide a positive user experience for the end user.
Then how can a great UI/UX design benefit a business?
1. Increase the customer acquisition
Attracting new customers:
When a website or app has a well-crafted UI/UX, it is both visually attractive and engaging for the user, resulting in a more enjoyable experience. Furthermore, an effective UI/UX design can communicate the story behind a business’ products, including what they are, how they work, and why they are selling their products.
Positive word-of-mouth:
When users have a positive experience with a well-designed product or service, they are more likely to recommend it to others, which helps attract new customers and expand the user base through positive word-of-mouth advertising. According to a research by Nielsen in 2021, word-of-mouth marketing is one of the most effective marketing channels, which made up the trust of 88% of the global respondents.
Improving search engine rankings:
UI/UX design makes an indirect impact on SEO. When a website has a good user interface and user experience, it is more likely that the customer would spend more time interacting with the application, which leads to higher engagement rate and lower bounce rate. Engagement rate and bounce rate are the two important SEO metrics that search engines such as Google and Bing take into consider when ranking websites. Improving these measurements leads to the enhancement of the website’s search engine ranking. Moreover, when users have a positive experience on a website, they are more likely to return and recommend the website to others, which could lead to increased brand awareness and natural backlinks, both of which are important for SEO.
Differentiation from competitors:
UI/UX design can help to establish and reinforce your company’s brand identity, which can help to differentiate it from competitors. By highlighting the business’s unique aspects, customers may find the business more attractive compared to other competitors and look for it for specific purposes that other brands cannot offer. For instance, Nike’s website interface emphasizes an active, creative, innovative and more arrogant lifestyle, distinguishing them from Adidas, which has a more friendly and caring brand personality.
2. Increase the customer engagement
Enhancing usability:
A good UI/UX design emphasizes usability and simplifies complex processes or interactions. This encourages customers to engage with the product or service, as it becomes more intuitive and easier to use.
Building emotional connections:
A well-designed UI/UX can build emotional connections with customers. By evoking positive emotions such as joy or excitement from using the product or service, customer engagement will increase, as customers feel a personal connection to the product. This also explains why marketers should utilize websites and mobile apps to leverage marketing campaigns.
Coca-Cola “Share a Coke” is one of the many campaigns that established their campaign activities on their exclusive website. This campaign has triggered the emotional connection to the brand when it tapped into the customer’s nostalgia feeling of sharing Coke with their friends or family members. In this case, Coca-Cola has demonstrated a significant ability to understand its customer insights and produced a well-designed UI/UX website to deliver superior customer experiences. The campaign’s result was spectacular with 76 thousand virtual Coke cans shared, 378 thousand printed cans sold, approximately 12 million earned media impressions, and 870% increase in Facebook traffic.
3. Increase customer retention
Enhanced user experience:
A well-designed UI/UX can provide a positive experience for customers, making it easy and enjoyable to use the application. This creates a good impression and encourages users to continue using and returning to the product or service.
Improved navigation:
An intuitive and easy-to-use UI/UX can make it easy for customers to navigate and use the product or service. This reduces frustration and increases customer satisfaction, which in turn increases retention rates.
Efficient task completion:
A good UI/UX design requires profound research on the customer preferences and habits. With a thorough understanding about the customer journey, designers can create effective applications to deliver satisfying customer experiences, which would help the customers save their time to complete their tasks. As a result, this enhances the usability, making it more attractive to customers and increasing retention. For example, a meticulous understanding of the process of the customer online purchase journey will help designers eliminate redundant steps in the customer purchasing process on the website and conduct a more efficient user flow.
Encourage customer feedback:
An application with good UI/UX design can facilitate customer feedback and make it easy for customers to provide input and suggestions for improvement. By listening to and incorporating customer feedback into design updates, customer satisfaction and retention may increase.
Ensure the brand consistency:
Brand consistency refers to the steadiness of the brand guidelines, message, and tone of voice across different marketing channels. A well-designed UI/UX builds a cohesive user experience that aligns with a brand’s overall messaging and value. On the other hand, when the UI/UX design is not up to par, it leads to confusion, frustration, and a lack of trust among users.